Fall TV: Andy Samberg’s new sitcom is an arresting development

Andy Samberg may have left the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” but he’s managing to keep busy. He’s voiced Baby Brent in “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2,” now in post-production, is engaged to his longtime girlfriend, musician Joanna Newsom, is no doubt up to all kinds of insanely great stuff with collaborators Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer and he’s somehow finding time to star in and be co-producer of a forthcoming Fox sitcom, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

Samberg, and cast members Andre Braugher, Terry Crews, Chelsea Peretti, Joe Lo Truglio, Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero took up most of the stage in the international ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Thursday morning when they showed up to talk about the new Fox sitcom, which, for many veteran TV viewers, will evoke fond memories of “Barney Miller.”

The show w as created by Dan Goor and Michael Schur of ”Parks and Recreation” and will air Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT beginning Sept. 17.

It’s not a cop comedy, per se, but more accurately described by the producers as “a workplace comedy that happens to take place in a police precinct.”

Given the sad truth that TV in general seems to have lost its ability to create exciting new sitcoms, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” has a better shot than most new comedies of finding an audience quickly, not just because of Samberg and Braugher in the cast but because of the show’s writing.

There’s also an important diversity factor here. Although the producers said they didn’t set out to make the show a cross-section of contemporary America, that’s really what it is, and that’s a good thing. Not only do we get white and African American characters, but Braugher plays a gay married precinct captain and there are two Hispanic actresses in the cast.

When asked about that, Beatriz said, “It’s awesome

“It never happens that you look over and there’s another Latina actress on the show,” she continued, adding, “we’re not doing accents, we’re not doin’ anything spicy” — delivering that last phrase in a stereotyped Latin accent.

After writing much of his own material on “SNL,” and working with Taccone and Schaffer to write and produce their own special film segments, what’s it like for Samberg to be handed a script written by someone else?

“It’s liberating,” he said, “to show up and just be handed 25 great jokes that I would have love to have written myself.”